Art Against Empire eBook

AUD $9.99

Toward an Aesthetics of DegrowthBy Samuel Alexander

What role might art need to play in the transition beyond consumer capitalism? Can ‘culture jamming’ contribute to the necessary revolution in consciousness? And might art be able to provoke social change in ways that rational argument and scientific evidence cannot?

In this stimulating new book, degrowth scholar Samuel Alexander explores these questions, both in theory and practice. He begins with a novel theoretical defence of art and aesthetic interventions as activity that is necessary to effective social and political activism, and concludes by presenting over one hundred ‘culture jamming’ artworks from a range of contributors that challenge the status quo and expand the horizons of what alternatives are possible.

Description

Published 2017. 312 pages in PDF format

Simplicity Institute, Melbourne
ISBN 9780994160690

Samuel Alexander

Dr Samuel Alexander is a lecturer and researcher at the University of Melbourne, Australia, teaching a course called ‘Consumerism and the Growth Economy: Critical Interdisciplinary Perspectives’ as part of the Master of Environment. He is also co-director of the Simplicity Institute and a research fellow at the Melbourne Sustainable Society Institute. Alexander’s interdisciplinary research focuses on degrowth, permaculture, voluntary simplicity, ‘grassroots’ theories of transition, and the relationship between culture and political economy. His current research is exploring the aesthetics of degrowth.

His books include Degrowth in the Suburbs: A Radical Urban Imaginary (2019, co-authored with Brendan Gleeson); Carbon Civilisation and the Energy Descent Future (2018, co-authored with Josh Floyd); Art Against Empire: Toward an Aesthetics of Degrowth (2017); Wild Democracy: Degrowth, Permaculture, and the Simpler Way (2017); Just Enough is Plenty: Thoreau’s Alternative Economics (2016); Deface the Currency: The Lost Dialogues of Diogenes (2016); Prosperous Descent: Crisis as Opportunity in an Age of Limits (2015); Sufficiency Economy: Enough, for Everyone, Forever (2015); and Entropia: Life Beyond Industrial Civilisation (2013); he is also editor of Voluntary Simplicity: The Poetic Alternative to Consumer Culture (2009) and co-editor of Simple Living in History: Pioneers of the Deep Future (2014). In 2016 he also released a documentary called A Simpler Way: Crisis as Opportunity, co-produced with Jordan Osmond of Happen Films.